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Trajce Cvetkovski. The Farcical Side to the War on Media Piracy: A Popular Case of Divine Comedy?. Media, Culture & Society, March 2014; vol. 36, 2: pp. 246–257.

This article examines illegal consumption in popular media. Corporate citizens have portrayed media piracy as an activity comprising several layers of illegal and morally derelict behavior. They have waged a most aggressive war against consumers and technology pioneers. The need for deterrence, it appears, is obvious. However the internet paints a different picture. It reminds us just how little people care about breaking copyright laws. Online parodies concerning anti-piracy campaigns also affirm this development. This article revisits the war on piracy and the strategies adopted. It assesses the success of campaigns aimed at consumers. An argument that deterrence has a paradoxical and somewhat comical effect is advanced. The final part explores the nexus between parody and piracy. Social networking has created a potentially subversive force by encouraging farcical representations of centralized copyright governance models. The dramas are indeed sublime. It appears Dante was right about the human condition.

Tristan Mattelart. Audio-visual Piracy: Towards a Study of the Underground Networks of Cultural Globalization. Global Media and Communication, December 2009; vol. 5, 3: pp. 308-326.

With the availability of increasingly powerful means of digital reproduction, an extensive literature has developed on the pirating of audio-visual products, films, music and software, which discusses the threat this represents to Western cultural industries. This article seeks to move on from the context within which piracy has mostly been considered since the end of the 1990s – that of illicit downloading in developed countries – and to describe the phenomenon in all its many manifestations, especially in countries of the South and the East. We try here to understand to what extent pirated goods constitute, for millions of consumers in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and also in Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia, a major means of access to the products of local, regional, and international cultural industries. By doing this, we will shed light on some of the underground channels through which cultural globalization is operating.